Bastinadoed in the Masjid of Ámul: Bahá'u'lláh's Second Imprisonment
Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, (1944), Bahá'í Publishing Trust · Read original
When in Bahá'í history
Ámul (today: Ámul, Mázandaran, Iran)
The fort of Shaykh Ṭabarsí had fallen. Quddús and Mullá Ḥusayn and the three hundred companions who had defended it through the snows of 1848–49 were dead. Bahá’u’lláh had set out from Núr to bring help to them, but the road had been closed against Him, and now — on the way back through the small town of Ámul in Mázandarán — the local clergy had Him arrested.
Shoghi Effendi’s account in God Passes By names the place exactly. Bahá’u’lláh was taken to the namáz-khánih of the mujtahid of the town — the prayer-room from which the senior cleric of Ámul preached. There, in a building designed for the worship of God, He was bastinadoed: beaten on the soles of His feet with a heavy stick.
Bastinadoed in the namáz-khánih of the mujtahid of that town until His feet bled.
When that was finished and He was led out into the street, the crowd took up where the clerics had left off. He was pelted with stones, and hurled in His face the foulest invectives. The town’s notables, the clergy, and the mob had become a single instrument.
He bore it.
Shoghi Effendi reads the episode in a particular light. The Báb was, in 1850, only a year from His own martyrdom. The leadership of the Cause was already, by an unseen logic, beginning to pass. It was for the sake of those same defenders, whom He had intended to join, that He suffered His second imprisonment, this time in the masjid of Ámul.
Through that solidarity — undertaken without theatre, accepted without complaint — Bahá’u’lláh, in Shoghi Effendi’s reading, stepped into the very center of the stage so tragically vacated by the Báb. The mantle was being lifted long before the world knew it had been laid down.
He survived the beating. He went on. The forty years of Tablets, of exile, of Revelation that lay ahead would be carried, in part, on the same feet that had bled in Ámul.
Paraphrased from God Passes By (Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1944), pages 66-70; see original for full text.
Cite this story
Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/
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